Blanket made from spider silk

[kosh]

Pretty cool article and a pic of someone holding some pretty big spiders!!

1 Million Spiders Make Golden Silk For Rare Cloth

[Austen]

That is just awesome in so many ways.

[Widowman10]

wow, the only one existing today! i understand why, that would be a lot of hard work.

would be interesting to see the "machine" they hooked the spiders up to...

[GailC]

Wow, thats beautiful and I bet it feels wonderful. I've always loved golden orb spiders, way to go mother nature

[cacoseraph]

silk milkers i have seen in the past basically involved putting the spider on its back and taping spider's legs down with masking tape. then the spinnerets are tickled a bit to get some web on the finger... which is then dragged over what looked like a motorized fishing reel. when the motor was engaged the reel started to spin.... since the web was dragged over the reel it basically gets auto-pulled and wound.



they need to get improving on those spider silk goats




oh, and p.s. iirc, the golden color comes from some kinda waste products =P

[What]

And here I was concerned about what the pet trade was doing to spider populations...

[Ether Imp]

I don't think they're damaging the spider populations.

[What]

You dont think collecting a spider, milking a large portion of its protein intensive silk, and then releasing it had any effect on the population?

How about just considering the stress of being collected and then milked? These spiders arent exactly known for being laid back...

[Ether Imp]

You dont think collecting a spider, milking a large portion of its protein intensive silk, and then releasing it had any effect on the population?

How about just considering the stress of being collected and then milked? These spiders arent exactly known for being laid back...

By reading the entire article it seems to me there's a huge population of these orb weavers in Madagascar. If they collected over a million different spiders, and even 10% of them died for whatever reason, it's not like they wiped out the population.

[8+)]

Yeah, I'm sure the population is in no danger of being "wiped out", esp. considering what a labor of love this was! Still, must of had some impact and doesn't seem altogether humane.

I can just see some despot deciding that this the ultimate "royal cloth" and demanding garments and rugs being made out of it! Probably would of definitely happened in earlier times if they had worked this out back then.

[TheTyro]

I just read that the other day, man I wonder what it feels like. I'd love to have a tiny little cloth. But 4 years is...way too long. Makes you wonder how a one of a kind cloth like that would sell for.